Reforming Reformed Religion: J. S. Mill's Critique of the Natural Religion of the Enlightenment

2006 ◽  
pp. 138-162
Author(s):  
Robert Devigne
Author(s):  
Ritchie Robertson

Goethe was brought up in Frankfurt, a Protestant city where the Lutheran Church held sway, but was also introduced to key Enlightenment texts through his father’s extensive library. ‘Religion’ explains that an early Pietist phase strengthened the value that Goethe placed on tolerance in religious matters. Goethe’s standpoint was what the 18th century called ‘natural religion’. Goethe’s allegiance to the Enlightenment is seen in his work, including the poem ‘Prometheus’ (1774) and the neoclassical drama Iphigenie in Tauris (1786–7). Goethe seems to anticipate Nietzsche in viewing human life as ‘beyond good and evil’. What mattered to Goethe was individuality, which brings him close to the greatest contemporary philosopher, Immanuel Kant.


1978 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 77-93
Author(s):  
D. D. Raphael

What darkness was the ‘Enlightenment’ supposed to have removed? The answer is irrational forms of religion. Most of the ‘enlightened’ took the view that revealed religion was irrational and that natural religion could be rational; but some were sceptical about natural religion too. Hume was the most honest and the most penetrating thinker of the latter group. His biographer, Professor E. C. Mossner, is not alone in believing that the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion is ‘his philosophical testament’.


1978 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 77-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. D. Raphael

What darkness was the ‘Enlightenment’ supposed to have removed? The answer is irrational forms of religion. Most of the ‘enlightened’ took the view that revealed religion was irrational and that natural religion could be rational; but some were sceptical about natural religion too. Hume was the most honest and the most penetrating thinker of the latter group. His biographer, Professor E. C. Mossner, is not alone in believing that the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion is ‘his philosophical testament’.


2021 ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Paschalis M. Kitromilides

This chapter on Enlightenment and religion in Europe brings together the evidence relating to an understanding of the relationship seen in broader terms. Manichean interpretations arguing for the total incompatibility of Enlightenment and religion are no longer tenable. Evidence from the history of Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, and Judaism is discussed in order to illustrate how reflection on ideas of natural religion, natural law, and the interplay of reason and revelation, by thinkers firmly grounded in traditions of religious faith, allowed a broadening of mutual understanding between the Enlightenment and European religious traditions and contributed to the growth of ideas of toleration.


Author(s):  
Christopher J. Berry

There is no programmatic statement in Smith about the nature of human nature only, rather, a profuse scattering of remarks. However, it is clear that he shared the aspirations of the 'Enlightenment project', within which a self-awareness of a ‘conception of man’ was focal. There was a convergence on the idea that human nature is constant and uniform in its operating principles. By virtue of this constancy human nature was predictable so that once it was scientifically understood then, as Hume argued, a new foundation was possible for, inter alia, morals, criticism, politics and natural religion. While Smith is more circumspect he shares Hume’s ambitions for the “science of man”, which Smith calls the “science of human nature” and which he believes was, even in the seventeenth century, in its “infancy.” What Smith implies about this ‘science’ is explicated.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gani Wiyono

In the pre-modern world people generally believed in the supernatural.  Individuals and culture as a whole believed in the existence of God (or gods), angels, and demons.  The visible world owed its existence and meaning to a spiritual realm beyond the senses.  However, such worldviews began to die with the coming of Enlightenment of 17th and 18th centuries.  The age of reason, scientific thinking, and human autonomy that characterized the Enlightenment brought to being the so-called natural religion.  The result was the disappearance of immanent God (Deism) and the rejection of the socalled “excluded middle” – the unseen world of spirits, and the supernatural.  Such attitude may well be summarized in Rudolf Bultmann’ famous statement:  “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discovers, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament worlds of spirits and miracles.”


2000 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 657-660
Author(s):  
Mary Gergen
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.


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